Hollywood Stars' Do-Gooder Deeds

MY FIRST TORTURE

Rendition parades the pedigree of its talent: Academy Award winners Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin and director Gavin Hood, the South African who took the Foreign Film Oscar last year for Tsotsi. But it practically chokes on the exertions of its script, by Kelley Sane.

The story concerns an Egyptian, Anwar El-Ibrahim (Omar Metwally), a scientist with impeccable credentials, a handsome demeanor — he could be a cross between Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria and TIME managing editor Rick Stengel — and, unlucky for him, some phone-bill numbers suggesting a connection with terrorists. Returning to the U.S. from a conference abroad, he is kidnapped at the airport, rudely questioned by the Feds and shipped off to Egypt for a more intense interrogation: "extreme rendition," in the euphemism for having other governments give our suspects the third degree. The grilling is led by a tough bald guy who summons memories of Telly Savalas in his brutal, pre-Kojak days. "We have a saying here," he tells a CIA observer. "Beat your woman every morning. If you don't know why, she does.'"

The American, who's on hand to monitor the El-Ibrahim's whipping and stripping, is a winsome whelp (Gyllenhaal) clearly out of his pay-range. "You're new at this, aren't you?" observes his hard, corrupt boss (Streep), to which Jake admits, with a virgin's gulp, "This is my first torture."

At home, El-Ibrahim's all-American wife Isabella (Witherspoon) has heard nothing from her spouse. She hopes to get answers with the help of an old beau (Peter Sarsgaard) who works for a U.S. Senator (Arkin). In the film's one juicy scene, Witherspoon rails at Streep for her blithe cruelty; it's a teary explosion of power, pity and anger that shows Witherspoon ready, after a decade of playing cute (brilliantly), to unleash her gifts on grownup roles.

But wait, there's more. The senior Egyptian torture guy has a daughter who's been recruited by the young member of an Arab nationalist — OK, terrorist — cell, who wants to get close enough to her father to kill him. (Shades of the Ang Lee movie Lust, Caution, which is also at this year's TIFF.) And guess what? For the Arab boy, using the girl is part of a personal mission: his brother was killed by her father.

At this point, even those viewers who are opposed to the U.S. government's policies in the middle East, and want to believe the worst in our leaders and those to whom they are sending their perceived enemies for special attention, may become exasperated. I'd be one of those. I wished the film had a rump so I could spank it for misuse of my political sympathies. A serious drama shouldn't have such clear-cut heroes and villains.

Again, the skeptic in me got balky. Halfway through the film, I was hoping El-Ibrahim would turn out to be in cahoots with terrorists. After all, the pertinent moral question is not "Is it justifiable to torture good guys?" but "Is it ethical to torture bad guys?" There's the same attitude toward culpability here as old Hollywood movies like Fury and The Ox-Box Incident had about lynching: don't do it because the victim might be innocent. No: don't do it if he's guilty, either. Lynching demeans the majesty of law; torture defaces the ideals our system of government is supposed to uphold.

Rendition wants to be commended for raising issues that fester on our body politic, and it's good to see that, after only six years, Hollywood is sponsoring a film about our government's eagerness to outsource its guilty conscience. But it's still a desperately disappointing movie.

I do hear, however, that those who attended the Toronto party for the film gave it Thumbs Up.